Ten of us attended. The theme for this month was to read out pieces we would like to offer for the anthology. A weird theme emerged with three pieces touching on peadophilia – uh-oh! Luckily we also had some Japanese fantasy and a Sherlock Holmes mystery as well as more poetry than usual.

We congratulated Jeremy on the success and completion of Chindi’s Writearound Sussex competition and discussed plans for our anthology. A sub-committee volunteered itself to act as editorial. Hoping to publish the anthology around May.

I was reviewing our current members and realised two have stopped communicating, with no explanation. Both are surprising; the first dropped off the radar several months ago. At the time the group was looking for new premises and this person offered us her business premises. How nice! On the day, she contacted me to say she was too ill to let us in so we cancelled our meeting. And that was the last we heard from her – worryingly. Thank God for Facebook. She may not have been responding to my emails asking if she was OK and could we arrange the next month’s meeting date but at least with Facebook I could see she was still alive enough to post her business news. Not quite as much of a ghost as I feared.

And now it’s happened again! Another one ignoring emails and a Facebook message checking she was OK. A member who had fitted in straight away and had quickly made friends, we thought, sending supportive emails to members apart from the usual meeting stuff. And then suddenly nothing. It’s fine, we’ll survive, but being ghosted leaves you, me, us, wondering: what did we do wrong? Was it something we said, or did, or didn’t do?

I worry about these people, with good reason. One of our members, a young man of immense talent, tragically died in early 2015. Emails to him went unanswered for a week or so until a family member contacted us to inform us of his funeral. I’d like to think his ghost turns up at our meetings still.

But the other two, our living ghosts? Is it really too difficult just to drop a line saying thanks, but your group is not for me? But no, instead I waste my time worrying about them, contacting them to check they’re OK, wondering if and how we may have offended them and ultimately crossing them off our distribution list, while I feel guilty, when surely it should be them.

Maybe as writerswe’ll have our revenge in a writers way. Our theme one month can be: What happened to our ghosts? Maybe for our halloween meeting? Then we’ll publish our results to see if that gets a response. Mwahahaha!

We are a small friendly group of would-be professional writers of fiction, poetry and prose. We meet once a month in the local pub’s back room to read out our latest 1000 word selection, ranging from short stories, novels in progress, poetry and even a business manual.